So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The glory from his grey hairs gone
For ever more.
Much later, in a kind of palinode, he, addressing the shade of Webster, gave a good example of the vigour of his octosyllabics!
But, where the native mountains bare
Their foreheads to diviner air,
Fit emblem of enduring fame,
One lofty summit keeps thy name.
For thee, the cosmic forces did
The rearing of that pyramid,
The prescient ages shaping with
Fire, flood, and frost thy monolith.
The rigorous critic may say that the idea is derived from Byron; and object to
forces did
The rearing of that pyramid,
as a somewhat colloquial idiom, but the lines have very great speed and vigour.
If we insist that a very young literature must produce for inspection her national poet (and Mr. Lowell says that foreign critics made this demand very early indeed) the poet cannot be Poe, and Whitman is hardly eligible. Whittier seems, so far, to be the best candidate for the bays.
Many admirers of Burns will be eager to confess that Whittier's "Snow-bound" has merits superior to those of the Ayrshire ploughman's companion-piece, "The Cottar's Saturday Night".
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.